Love is Always a Little Inconvenient

Dear All Souls, 

A familiar saying goes, everyone wants a village. We ache for belonging, for warmth, for a people to hold us steady when the ground feels unsteady. As beings created in the image of a God who cannot exsist in isolation, we are, at our very foundations, people created for relationship. 

But being a part of a village, moving with God deeper into our humanity asks something of us. That’s the harder part. Because to be a villager requires proximity. It means living where your life brushes against other lives. It means being where you are interrupted, needed, sometimes annoyed. It means staying when leaving would be easier, showing up when your heart is elsewhere, choosing to remain in the slow and difficult work of being known.

All Saints’ Sunday reminds us that the life of faith has always been a village life. As followers of Jesus, we inherit a story of ordinary people who learned to love one another in close quarters. They cooked, prayed, argued, forgave, and carried one another’s burdens. Their holiness was not bright and polished, if anything, it was scuffed, shared, and unfinished. They did not become saints because they were flawless, but because they kept saying yes to belonging, even when belonging was costly. 

Somewhere along the way, humanity mistook comfort for peace. We built careful routines and called them protection. But the saints whisper that love is always a little inconvenient. It rearranges our time and unsettles our solitude. It draws us toward tables where others are waiting, hungry for the same mercy that feeds us. 

So this All Saints’ Sunday, remember to bring your photos or items that can serve as symbols of those we remember. Bring your stories and your memories, but also bring your hesitations. Bring the parts of you that would rather not be needed and would rather not need. For in that place,  Spirit is already at work, teaching us again what it means to be villagers in the kingdom of God.

With grace and affection,

Bliss +

p.s.  For a portion of my homily on Sunday, I am going to be inviting you to share a story from the life of the person you are remembering on All Saints. Be thinking of a story of how you saw the Living God in and through them.